Articles Spring 2013

Belgium (1) Mons(14th April 2013)

Unique Baroque belfry of Mons.

History in a nutshell Mons is a Walloon city and municipality located in the Belgian province of Hainaut, of which it is the capital. Together with the Czech city of Plzen, Mons was selected to be the European capital of culture in 2015. Just a few highlights of the city’s history. Julius Caesar built a castrum to the area inhabited by the Nervii. Waltrude (in French Sainte Waudru) was proclaimed a (local) saint in 688. In May 1572 the city was taken over by Dutch Protestant Louis of Nassau. The Spanish Catholic Duke of Alba took control in September of that same year. This spelled the ruin of the city and the arrest of many of its inhabitants. From 1580 to 1584 Mons became the capital of the Southern Netherlands. From 1697 to 1701 Mons was alternatively French or Austrian. After Belgium gained its independence in 1830, the fortifications were taken down allowing the creation of large boulevards. The industrial Revolution and coal mining made Mons a centre of heavy industry. At the end of the First World War, Mons was liberated by the Canadian Corps. During the Second World War, the city was heavily bombed. NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) are located in Casteau, a village near Mons. Education The University of Mons (French: Université de Mons) is a new Belgian university located in the city of Mons, created by merging the Engineering Faculty of Mons (FPMs) and the University of Mons-Hainaut. The merging of the institutions was achieved following a geographical logic because of the high complementarity between them and their location in the same city. There are also a Catholic University, a Conservatoire Royal and a higher school “Reine Astrid”Main sights The Grand Place is quite extended and the pleasant terraces fill up, weather permitting. The City Hall is a flamboyant gothic building. The collegiate church of Sainte Waudru is paradoxically a good specimen of Gothic architecture of the province of Brabant. The neighbouring belfry, classified as World Heritage Site, dates from the 17th century and is the only Baroque-style belfry in Belgium. The so-calles Spanish house dates from the 16th century. The Museum François Duesberg is devoted to decorative arts from the period of 1775 to 1825. It has a prestigious collection of clocks and mantel clocks, exceptional gilded French bronzes, porcelain, pottery and jewelry. Festivities The Doudou is the name of a week-long series of festivities, originating fro the 14th century and taking place every year on Trinity Sunday. This includes entrusting the reliquary of Sainte Waltrude to the mayor of the city, the lifting of the Car d’Or, and the Lumeçon fight where Saint George confronts the dragon which is listed among the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Today It was the first really bright and sunny day of the year today. We set out for Mons, the city of our Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo, who is the son of a poor Italian immigrant and the first openly gay PM in Europe. Belgium has many flaws, but foreigners living here tell us they love it despite the flaws, and on a sunny day like this, I do too. It struck me how few people stroll or walk around - not just here of course, this is general. People either sit at home in front of screens, or move in machines called cars. So the streets were quiet, and there were relatively many African people about, compared to the scale of the town. A large group of African children and some adults were nicely livening up the footpath in front of an Evangelical Church. Terraces on the Grand Place were full with local people basking in the sun. We forgot to stop by the monkey in front of the City Hall - he's supposed to bring luck! The prison has got huge steel fences that run much higher than the former nineteenth century walls. It was a pleasant walk though the city centre to the Baroque belfry located in a small park from which you overlook the city and where young lovers like to lie on the grass. More or less in front of the Spanish House is an interesting Renaissance building. The good-looking Youth Hostel is brand new. The railway station and its surroundings are also quite modern. BAM or Beaux Arts Mons organizes temporary exhibitions on four different locations. Many historic buildings are well preserved or restored. Streets are clean and Mons looks like a rather happy place to us. If the sun shines, we’ll come back. The Mundaneum The Mundaneum was an institution created in 1910, following an initiative begun in 1895 by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, as part of their work on documenta- tion science. It aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification. Otlet and La Fontaine organized an International Conference of International Associations which was the origin of the Union of International Associations (UIA). Otlet regarded the project as the centerpiece of a new 'world city'—a centrepiece which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents. Some consider it a forerunner of the Internet (or, perhaps more appropriately, of systematic knowledge projects such as Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha) and Otlet himself had dreams that one day, somehow, all the information he collected could be accessed by people from the comfort of their own homes. The Mundaneum was originally housed at the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels (Belgium), but has been relocated to a converted 1930’s department store in Mons, where the existing museum opened in 1998. Google has very recently announced it is going to invest an extra 300 million “Euro Dollars” to develop its Data Center in Mons, creating 200 new jobs in the IT sector. An IKEA shop is going to open in 2015 near Mons, also creating 650 to 700 jobs requiring low skills.